SkySafe is available on "the most popular public clouds," including Amazon Web Services, as well as in private cloud form. Pricing will vary depending on the particular customer's configuration. SkyStorage and SkyInsight are set for release in April.

Ingres made its moves based on feedback from customers, who wanted the elasticity cloud deployments provide, said senior vice-president of marketing Ketan Karia.

Moving forward, the company intends to aggressively court partners that will offer services, tools and applications on top of SkySafe, said CEO Terry Garnett. Ingres will be able to serve as a compelling alternative to rivals such as Oracle, he added.

"The customer control and pricing that Oracle is going to eventually extract from you, that's going to be a lot more painful than working with us," he said. He referred to Salesforce.com's recently announced Database.com service, which is based partly on Oracle's database.

"This is a completely me-too announcement," he said. "Every software-only analytic DBMS should run in the public cloud, and almost all the others already do," he said. And although VectorWise has "a clever architecture," the technology is still maturing, Monash said.